Digital Humanities (DH) and AI in African Studies: Opportunities, Challenges, and Decolonial Perspectives
Abstract
As the "digital turn" in African studies gains momentum, this panel explores the transformative potential and critical challenges of digital humanities (DH) and artificial intelligence (AI) in the field. We examine their impact on the production, dissemination, and interpretation of knowledge about Africa, addressing the persistent Anglocentricity and "digital divide".
We invite papers that present innovative applications of computational methods in African studies and/or critical reflections on decolonising DH practices. Topics may include:
1. Methodological innovations:
Digital approaches to exploring African, Afropolitan, and Afropean belongings through textual and visual analysis;
AI-driven analysis of digitised African content (e.g., natural language processing, named entity recognition);
Teaching African history with digital tools
2. Critical perspectives:
Decolonising DH methodologies and epistemologies;
Addressing "digital imperialism" (Breckenridge 2014) and the "digital saviour complex" (Shringarpure 2020) in relation to positionality and knowledge construction;
Ethical considerations in applying DH methods to culturally sensitive contexts
3. Knowledge production and dissemination:
Digital platforms for alternative knowledge production and public scholarship centred on African perspectives;
Strategies for overcoming selective digitisation and colonial hierarchies in digital archiving;
Transnational and cross-continental collaborative digital projects that challenge established Global North paradigms
The panel aims to showcase cutting-edge transdisciplinary research that uses digital methods to explore the complexities of African realities, identities, and knowledge systems. By fostering dialogue on the potential and pitfalls of digital approaches, we aim to contribute to a more inclusive, diverse, and critically aware digital landscape in African studies.
Event: 10th European Conference of African Studies (ECAS)
Location: Prague
Country: Czech Republic
Language: English
Year: 2025
Papers in this Panel
Linking African Cultural Metadata for Visibility, Searchability, and Sustainability: the African Literary Metadata (ALMEDA) project
The ALMEDA project is comprised of three interrelated work packages: the first investigates the history of literary metadata on the African continent in order to understand how colonial cataloguing systems came to construct the idea of the 'literary work' as book-based and thus dismissive of Africa's oral cultures. Secondly, and as a corrective to this history, ALMEDA is developing a metadata ontology specifically designed for African genres in African languages. Not only does this knowledge structure enable data entry and searchability in multiple languages, but it also involves a unique descriptive model that allows African-language genres to inhabit their own categories, rather than having to be forced into European literary ontologies. Thirdly, the project is creating a linked open metadata repository, run as a Wikibase instance, which will – when launched – be the means through which users can search for and enter data. In this presentation of the project, I aim to show some of the challenges and potentials we face in the area of African Studies when working with Linked Open Data and to present ALMEDA's emerging methods of addressing those problems. The project seeks feedback from as wide a range of stakeholders and Africanists as possible, and the paper encourages feedback on our ontology and our tentative resolutions to the challenges of addressing multilingual needs in a database of this scale.
The Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA): Enabling New Digital Modes of Knowledge Production Through Cross-Lingual Ontologies
This paper presents the Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA), a database at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) designed to digitally enhance collaborative research on Islam in Africa in English, French and Arabic. The ICA is a digital platform to handle data through an ontology-based digital research environment building on WissKI, a set of modules that combines the Drupal content management system with semantic web technology. Connecting diverse languages and data from various digital and digitized media, the research team members generate metadata through a shared ontology to create synergies between various research foci and interests, ranging from the nexus of Islamic knowledge production, dissemination, and acquisition to the socio-religious, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Islamic learning in Africa. There are plans to expand the thematic scope of the data collection in the future. What makes the project especially significant for decolonial methodologies and epistemologies is the joint development of cross-lingual ontologies with mainly African academic partners, enabling the ICA to reflect the relational and reflexive knowledge production involved in its creation and thus setting new standards for transcontinental and transdisciplinary research.
Re-imagining Africa's Past in Digital Age: Using Linked Open Data to revolutionise Archive Connectivity and Accessibility
This project will develop Linked Open Data methodologies connecting multidisciplinary archival collections for the first time, revolutionizing accessibility to materials from different regions in Africa. We will demonstrate how data from different regions is interlinked, using examples from the British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA) archive and the British Institute of Libya and Northern Africa Studies (BILNAS). This project's use of Linked Open Data will have an impact on knowledge production by creating an avenue where African researchers can re-interpret data collected in the colonial and postcolonial period through an indigenous lens, using Afrocentric frameworks to deconstruct and reconstruct identities which were often misrepresented by Eurocentric research in the past. For example, the portal will create an avenue where pre-colonial African trade links and exchanges within the continent and beyond can be illuminated. An early focus on the connections between Islamic architecture collections across different institutions - including those outside of Africa in the Levant and Italy, representing Roman, Byzantine and Islamic civilisations - has raised the profile of these archives and provided archivists with leverage to advocate for increased time and resources spent on improving metadata and digitising these collections. We are demonstrating the potential of these methods through digital storytelling and map-based data visualizations, showing how Linked Open Data can facilitate answers to new and complex research questions. We will also comment on the limitations of the Anglocentric collection descriptions, and of reinterpretation of the materials when they remain under the control of organisations in the Global North.
Taking the ESCALATOR from Humanities to Digital Humanities
The South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) is a research infrastructure that, among others, aims to build research capacity in Digital Humanities across South Africa. While SADiLaR has successfully conducted training activities to familiarize participants with Digital Humanities tools, these efforts in the past have been ad hoc, lacking both follow-up support and dedicated channels for on-going assistance. The ESCALATOR project was conceived to address these limitations. Following a needs assessment that identified demand for a Digital Humanities community of practice, the project implements several strategic initiatives. Training activities have been restructured into a progressive curriculum designed to develop champions who can provide direct support to researchers at their respective universities. A Slack platform has been established to facilitate information sharing about funding opportunities and events, while also serving as a forum for questions and answers. The project organizes regional DH-IGNITE in-person events to foster networking and showcase research possibilities across universities. Additionally, a stakeholder mapping tool enables researchers to position themselves within the broader Digital Humanities landscape, facilitating collaboration among scholars working on similar topics. These coordinated efforts create a model that may benefit others seeking to develop similar communities of practice in Digital Humanities.
AI-Powered Analysis of Arabic Manuscripts: Accelerating Access to Sudan's Endangered Archives
Sudan's public and private archives face existential threats from ongoing civil war, risking the loss of historical sources before their voices can challenge dominant narratives still shaped by colonial accounts and the weight of metropolitan perspectives in the Global North. The Sudan Collection at the University of Bergen, containing copies of approximately 5000 documents from Sudanese archives, has become increasingly vital given the precarious state of the originals, particularly land documents that may inform post-war settlements. The Universities of Bergen, Oslo, and Khartoum are collaborating to digitize and catalogue this collection for UNESCO World Heritage List nomination. While digitization provides unprecedented access, traditional textual scholarship struggles to keep pace, and Arabic HTR (handwritten text recognition) remains limited by extensive pre-training requirements. This paper presents an innovative method to unlock large Arabic manuscript collections using Google's Document AI, accessed through a simple programming interface. Despite imperfect HTR output, this tool, combined with large language models, enables effective automated content analysis and summarization. By reducing the time required to identify materials warranting detailed examination, this workflow frees valuable resources for in-depth textual analysis. This methodology has been validated by comparing results against conventionally studied samples. The presentation will demonstrate both the technical workflow and its application to a unique corpus of 600+ manuscript pages from 18th-20th century Sudan in the Bergen collection. This approach not only expedites research but also amplifies local voices preserved within these manuscripts, contributing to a more inclusive and representative understanding of Sudanese history.
Data Riddles: Mapping Senufo as a Case Study
Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge—a collaborative, iterative, born-digital publication project—focuses on arts recognized as Senufo, one of the most celebrated and documented styles of so-called historical, traditional, or classical arts of Africa since the early twentieth century. Senufo also names a language family and a cultural or ethnic group spanning the borders of present-day Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali. Recent generations of local knowledge experts in this region report transmission of insights through riddles that invite each learner to arrive at their own conclusions based on careful observation, reflection, and experimentation. This form of knowledge dissemination encourages slow thinking and processing of information that the digital realm tends to thwart through its promise of fast facts accessible in an instant to anyone with a data connection. For instance, when they consult museum websites, users might assume the details presented to them rest on solid evidence. However, available data often constitute riddles more than indisputable details. In this presentation, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi draws on her work with the Mapping Senufo project team to demonstrate possibilities for slowing down engagement in the digital realm and recuperating processes of observation, reflection, and experimentation. She reflects on what the project team has learned along the way and examines possible next steps.
Historian vs AI: who reads and analyses archives best?
This paper evaluates the potential of large language models in relation to human source criticism, examining two contrasting cases. First, we revisit the British Colonial Office files on the Cameroon War (1957–63), comparing a historian's interpretations with the summaries and targeted answers on chronology, agency and motive provided by Gemini 2.5 Pro. Secondly, we scale up to the Islam West Africa Collection, comprising 24 million words from 15,000 newspaper clippings and 1,500 Islamic publications. This collection is processed through custom pipelines that repair OCR errors, reconstruct layout, tag entities and measure sentiment. While AI excels at scale and pattern detection, it also perpetuates colonial framings, highlighting the necessity of human oversight and contextual judgement. Rather than victory for one side, the evidence points to a collaborative model in which historians design prompts, audit outputs, and ensure that interpretation remains accountable, while machines handle routine, corpus-wide tasks.